Interior Minister Lucian Bode claims that he has sued Babeș Bolyai University in Cluj because „the University Ethics Commission can only carry out checks on members of the university community, as defined by law, a community to which I do not belong”. In a statement to G4Media.ro, Bode also said that he had sent a notification to Babeș-Bolyai University to clarify some legal issues regarding the procedure for the re-examination of his doctoral thesis, to which he had not received a reply.

Journalist Emilia Șercan revealed, in a text published on pressone.ro, that Interior Minister Lucian Bode sued, on 5 January, the Ethics Commission of the University „Babeș-Bolyai” in Cluj-Napoca (UBB), in a desperate attempt to block the issuing of a predictable plagiarism verdict on his Ph.D. thesis.

PressOne exclusively revealed on 24 November 2022 that Interior Minister Lucian Bode’s Ph.D. thesis contains at least 18.5% plagiarised text, as well as 6 completely plagiarised illustrations and 30 others incorrectly quoted.

On the same day, UBB announced in a press release that it was resuming the analysis, after „taking note of new information that has appeared in the public space about new suspicions of plagiarism in Mr. Lucian Bode’s thesis”, and that the Ethics Commission „has taken note and would analyze the thesis from the point of view of academic ethics on the basis of this new information”.

Below is Lucian Bode’s full point of view:

„As you know, I have shown, on every occasion, total openness towards the requests coming from the Ethics Commission of Babeș-Bolyai University regarding my Ph.D. thesis.

In all the steps I have taken up to this point, I have sought only one thing: respect for the law. I still maintain that my doctoral thesis does not contain unauthorized excerpts, all excerpts being highlighted by indicating this in the footnotes and in the list of references, according to the rules of writing in force at the time of the thesis.

I reiterate that, in recent years, my Ph.D. thesis has gone through absolutely all stages of analysis and has successfully passed through all verification filters. It has been checked for plagiarism by Babeș-Bolyai University and by the National Council for the Certification of University Degrees, Diplomas and Certificates (CNATDCU), and both institutions have officially certified the authenticity of the work.

The UBB Ethics Commission recently asked me to present a point of view on a non-academic endeavor, without scientific relevance, but, going through its content, I did not identify any concrete elements to which I should respond or which I should justify.

The procedure you refer to actually involved two distinct approaches:

First, I sent a notification to Babeș-Bolyai University to clarify some legality issues on the (re)examination procedure of my Ph.D. thesis, to which I did not receive a reply.

The next natural step was to file a claim in the administrative court, through the lawyers assisting me on this matter, in order to ensure that all the procedures carried out by the Ethics Committee are in full compliance with the law. All the more so since, according to the law, the University Ethics Commission can only conduct checks on members of the university community as defined by law, a community of which I am not a member.

Also in accordance with the law, I have initiated this last step, of filing a request in court, with the Sălaj Court, the county where I am domiciled.

As I have indicated on other occasions, I am determined to fully support any action taken by the Babeș-Bolyai University, as long as it is within the limits of the law and pursues legitimate interests.”

Background

Both the Chancellor of UBB, Daniel David, and the President of the Ethics Commission, Dacian Dragoș, have publicly announced that UBB will call on international experts for this new analysis of the scientific work of the Minister of the Interior, on the basis of which he obtained in 2018 – under the coordination of prof. Adrian Ivan, rector of the SRI Academy – the title of doctor.

Previously, at the end of October 2022, the „Babeș-Bolyai” University had established in a decision – viewed with suspicion in the public space, since the plagiarism analysis was limited and did not concern the entire thesis – that only 2.95% of Lucian Bode’s work was plagiarized, content that it justified, with indulgence, by „lack of knowledge/non-application of citation techniques” by the PhD student or by „citation errors”.

Very shortly after the UBB Ethics Committee published its decision announcing the negligible 2.95% plagiarized content, the Minister of the Interior „welcomed” on his Facebook page, almost exaltedly, „the publication of the results of the UBB evaluation”.

„UBB verdict: My doctoral thesis is fine, and the doctoral title awarded in 2019 is maintained. Recently, UBB has pronounced itself on compliance with the rules of academic writing in my PhD thesis, and the result of the checks does not change the initial assessments of the thesis,” Bode wrote on Facebook.

Journalist Emilia Șercan notes that two months later, „after I presented overwhelming evidence that the Interior Minister’s doctoral thesis contains at least 18.5% plagiarism content – mainly through translation from English – without respecting the rules of citation and attribution, Lucian Bode went from „welcoming” the UBB Ethics Commission to suing it on 5 January 2023.”

The lawsuit filed by Minister Lucian Bode four days ago, at the Administrative and Fiscal Disputes Section of the Sălaj Court, concerns the decision by which the UBB Ethics Commission filed a complaint on 13 December 2022, 19 days after we published, for the first time, evidence showing that the Interior Minister plagiarised at least 18.5% of his doctoral thesis.

Translated article